BEN EBSWORTH
INFRA | SOFTWARE | HARDWARE
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All posts →Software· 5 min read
Backprop is just the chain rule
Training a neural network sounds mystical, but the engine underneath is one idea from first-year calculus: the chain rule, applied backwards through a computation graph and reusing its work. We trace a forward and backward pass through a tiny graph, see why we run it in reverse, and connect it to the downhill step that actually does the learning.
Software· 5 min read
How to paint with noise
Image generators start from pure TV static and end with a photo. The trick that makes it possible is wonderfully sneaky: don't learn to paint, learn to remove a little noise, then run that backwards from static. We build the forward noising process step by step, see the signal-versus-noise schedule, and work out why predicting noise is such a clever thing to train.
Software· 5 min read
Three rules build a computer
Conway's Game of Life has three rules and a grid of on-or-off cells, and nothing else. From that, gliders crawl, guns fire, and — astonishingly — you can build a working computer. We play with the rules, watch structure emerge that nobody designed, and follow the thread to its unsettling end: a system this simple can be impossible to predict.
From the lab
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